3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) long-term evolution (LTE) is a technology for enabling high-speed packet communications. Many schemes have been proposed for the LTE objective including those that aim to reduce user and provider costs, improve service quality, and expand and improve coverage and system capacity. The 3GPP LTE requires reduced cost per bit, increased service availability, flexible use of a frequency band, a simple structure, an open interface, and adequate power consumption of a terminal as an upper-level requirement.
In the future versions of the LTE-A, it has been considered to configure low-cost/low-end (or, low-complexity) user equipments (UEs) focusing on the data communication, such as meter reading, water level measurement, use of security camera, vending machine inventory report, etc. For convenience, these UEs may be called machine type communication (MTC) UEs. Since MTC UEs have small amount of transmission data and have occasional uplink data transmission/downlink data reception, it is efficient to reduce the cost and battery consumption of the UE according to a low data rate. Specifically, the cost and battery consumption of the UE may be reduced by decreasing radio frequency (RF)/baseband complexity of the MTC UE significantly by making the operating frequency bandwidth of the MTC UE smaller.
Some MTC UEs may be installed in the basements of residential buildings or locations shielded by foil-backed insulation, metalized windows or traditional thick-walled building construction. These MTC UEs may experience significantly greater penetration losses on the radio interface than normal LTE UEs. Thus, for these MTC UEs, coverage enhancement may be required. The MTC UEs in the extreme coverage scenario may have characteristics such as very low data rate, greater delay tolerance, and no mobility, and therefore, some messages/channels may not be required.
When a MTC UEs are introduced, a new feature for an initial access process may be required.